Biography

William A. Pryor was Thomas & David Boyd Professor of Chemistry and Director of both
the Biodynamics Institute and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU. Dr.
Pryor's research group was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health,
the National Science Foundation, and the National Foundation for Cancer Research,
the Environmental Protection Agency, the Health Effects Institute, U.S. Army and Air
Force, and a substantial number of national and international corporations. Research
grants awarded to Dr. Pryor exceed $60 million.Dr. Pryor grew up in Los Angeles and after grammar school and junior high, skipped
high school and went to the University of Chicago where he obtained a Ph.B.in philosophy
in1948 and B.S. in chemistry in 1951, and then was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry in
1954 from the University of California (Berkeley). His hobbies include biking, reading modern history, and classical music and jazz.
He played in a jazz band while at the U. of Chicago, has hosted a Public Radio program
named Classic Jazz for more than 50 years, starting in Chicago, then in San Francisco,
and now in Baton Rouge. He has published articles on jazz history and criticism, some
of which are listed in his publications below.

Area of Interest

Professor Pryor was a pioneer in the field of free radical research. His study of
hydrogen atom transfer from thiols to radicals led to a publication that remains the
simplest experimental demonstration of the Westheimer effect (which explains why the
maximum kinetic isotope effect is observed in the most symmetrical atom transfer reaction),
a paper designated a Citation Classic by the ISI. In the 1960's, he contrasted the
displacement reaction on peroxides and disulfides by anions with those of radicals,
and showed that radicals perform a “backside”, Walden inversion displacement reaction.Dr. Pryor is an expert on oxidative stress and the use of the antioxidant vitamins
in human health. Following the discovery of the enzyme superoxide dismutase in the
1960's, Dr. Pryor became the first free radical chemist to apply insights from organic
free radical chemistry to the study of radical reactions in biology and medicine.
He studied the oxidants and toxins in smog, including ozone, nitric oxide, nitrogen
dioxide, peroxynitrites, peroxynitrates, and fine particulate matter.His research on ozone showed it is too reactive to penetrate far enough into cells
to cause the effects that had been attributed to it. Instead, ozone reacts with the
first reactive species that it contacts when it first enters the lung; those species
are the unsaturated fatty acids present in the lung epithelial cell lining fluid (ELF).
Ozone reacts with unsaturated lipids in the ELF to produce lipid ozonation products
(LOP), and it is these LOP that act as biological signal transduction species and
relay the inflammatory and ancillary effects of ozone into deeper tissue strata than
ozone itself can reach.In 1975, Dr. Pryor’s showed that the autoxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids produces
the important signaling molecules called prostaglandins (PG), but that this autoxidation
leads to PG isomers with different (“unnatural”) stereochemistry from the PG produced
by our PG-synthesizing enzymes. He predicted these iso-PG compounds would have biological
activity in a paper became an ISI Citation Classic and is one of the 400 all-time
most cited papers in the life sciences, as ranked by the Council of Biology Editors.
In the past decade, a number of groups have demonstrated that iso-PG are indeed produced
in animals and humans, and that several iso-PG compounds have very potent biological
properties.

Awards & Honors

Lifetime Achievement Award of the Oxygen Society

MERIT Award from NIH (Dr. Pryor was the 1st)

Petroleum Chemistry Award, ACS

ACS Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest

Dr. Pryor was one of the first four scientists granted a MERIT Award from the National
Institutes of Health, an award created to insure continuous funding for outstanding
scientists. Dr. Pryor has been awarded some 25 national and international medals and
honors, including three awards from the NIH. He also was awarded five medals by the
American Chemical Society including the 2000 Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry
in the Public Interest.

Dr. Pryor is the author of nearly 1,000 articles, letters, and notes, and the author
or editor of more than 30 books that have been translated into many languages including
Russian and Japanese. One of his books, Free Radicals was the first textbook on free
radical chemistry and is an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) "Citation Classic"
by computer analysis. He was the Founding Editor of Free Radical Biology & Medicine,
the major journal on oxidative stress, and he served on the Board of Editors of numerous
other journals in the fields of chemistry, biology, nutrition, and gerontology, including
flagship journals of many societies. One of Dr. Pryor’s publications has been identified
by the Council of Biology Editors as one of the 400 all-time most cited papers in
the life sciences.